Friday, September 23, 2011

This past Wednesday we were lucky to have Kim Lundgren Senior Director, Strategy from Interbrand come speak to us about what Interbrand is and what they do. While all the members munched on dumplings Ms. Lundgren spoke about Interbrand's believe of "Creating and managing brand value." She explained that Interbrand is one of the world's largest brand consultancy firms and they work with many well known brands like AT&T. At the end of Ms. Lundgren's talk we had a really dynamic Q & A where a lot of interesting and informative questions were asked. It was a great meeting and we had over 50 people attend! Everyone get excited for next week when we have Red Bull coming to speak.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Last Wednesday was The Marketing Society's official kick-off event! We started out the meeting by introducing the eboard and talking about our social impact initiative, The Good Project. Once lunch, chicken or lamb over rice, arrived there was a short break before we resumed to play Brand Bingo. Brand Bingo is where there are pieces of famous logos or slogans projected on the screen and everyone had to try and guess what the companies were and see which ones were on their bingo boards. There were a few tricky ones but in the end we had quite a few bingo winners! Sorry for the lack of pictures this week in all of the kick off excitement I forgot to actually take any but promise every post from now on will have a few.

Monday, September 19, 2011

(from MASHABLE Business 9.19.11)

London Fashion Week, which kicked off Friday, is showcasing an increased commitment to all things digital this season. Designers and retailers are giving consumers around the world better access to shows and events than ever before through live, online showcases and digitally enhanced retail experiences.

Real-Time Access

Following partnerships with New York Fashion Week for the past couple of years, Twitter is focusing on London Fashion Week for the first time this season as part of a wider drive for the UK market. (Twitter opened an office in the capital earlier this year.)

The British Fashion Council (BFC) is working closely with the service to promote conversation around LFW using the hashtag #LFW, and by mentioning the official @LondonFashionWk account. The account tweets live updates from backstage and front of house, and hosts a series of Q&A sessions with guests such as BFC chief executive Caroline Rush and Newgen designer Louise Gray.

“The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a great way for people to find up-to-the minute information about events they care about … [including] London Fashion Week,” says Rachel Bremer, Twitter’s European communications director. “We’re really excited about how the British Fashion Council and brands like Burberry will be using the platform to help people all over the world feel like they’re sitting on the front row.”

Clara Mercer, marketing manager for the BFC, says that the digital push this season is designed to expand LFW’s geographical reach. “London has always been at the forefront of innovation in the industry, and we’re aiming to continue that by using technology in a way to promote our designers further to global markets,” she says.

Meanwhile, Burberry – always one of the highlights of the London Fashion Week schedule when it comes to digital – is set to introduce consumers to further innovations through its social media platforms.

Beginning Monday at 4 p.m. BST (11 a.m. ET), the brand will be posting Twitpics of every look from its Spring/Summer 2012 collection on Twitter, moments before the models hit the runway. Mobile-friendly livestreams are being hosted on Facebook, burberry.com and China’s Twitter and YouTube equivalents.Burberry’s Instagram account is being taken over by photographer Mike Kus, the most-followed Instagram user in the UK, for the duration of the show. The show’s album will later be made available on iTunes through its on-demand service.

Taking Digital Into the Offline Space & Vice Versa

The British Fashion Council has revived its digital schedule of livestreamed shows and fashion films this season. This time content is curated under different themes, such as ready-to-wear and accessories, to make it easier for consumers to follow the areas they’re interested in.

The same videos airing online play for a second time on an LED billboard at the entrance to LFW’s Somerset House headquarters, as well as a new space within the tents known as “the cinema.” In addition to rolling films and daily designer highlights, the cinema is also hosting live Q&A sessions with some of the film’s creators, including Jaime Perlman, art director of Vogue.

Bonus video content is also embedded throughout event spaces, which can be pulled up with augmented reality app Aurasma. The LFW logo and aspects of The LFW Daily newspaper, including its covers, come to life when scanned, for instance.

Topshop is also playing video of the nine shows its hosting at a purpose-built screening room in its Oxford Circus store. These can also be accessed online through topshop.com. In addition, the retailer is hosting public, in-store workshops with figures such as Yvan Rodic of style blog Facehunter and Alexander Fury ofShowstudio to shed light on the world of fashion and film in the digital age.

On the luxury side, Burberry is continuing its Runway to Reality events in 46 stores globally this season. Those invited will once again be able to watch the show live, and then pre-order certain items from the collection via in-store iPads, for delivery within just eight weeks.

Meanwhile, U.S. brand Kate Spade is pushing the launch of its new Sloane Street store in London with a guerrilla marketing campaign. The brand delivered flowers to influential London-based bloggers, encouraging them to wear the flowers to enhance their fashion week wardrobes and to tweet using the #popofcolor hashtag.

The Museum of London is also aiming to bridge the gap between the online and offline space this season. The museum released its collection of early twentieth-century fashion photography from the studios of Bassano Limited and put it online for public access. More than 3,000 glass negative plates documenting clothing, fashion and accessories, and taken between 1912 and 1945 are included.

Hilary Davidson, curator of fashion and decorative arts at the museum, says that the Bassano collection was chosen because of the “rich range of content” it proves. “The wonderful images reveal a lost world before professional models, Photoshop and strong brand control.”

Online Initiatives

Further online initiatives in time for the fashion week season include the unveiling of a new online magazinefrom luxury department store Harrods; a blog called Everything but the Dress from accessories brand Kurt Geiger; and the launch of Topshop’s Tumblr in a bid to provide a “new and very visual way” to inspire consumers.

Lastly, nine of the UK’s most influential bloggers — including Kristin Knox of The Clothes Whisperer and Laetitia Wajnapel of Mademoiselle Robot — are collaborating on one super-blog called Style Tribe, under the Glamour.com umbrella. The mag is also launching a competition to find a 10th contributor who will join the lineup for next season’s shows.

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Jamie Beckland is a digital and social media strategist atJanrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.

People are naturally social creatures. That’s what makes social media such a powerful concept. Social media channels allow human beings to sort themselves into groups and factions seamlessly, and maintain intimate relationships at greater distances than ever before.

But as anthropologist Herbert Spencer describes in his theory of the social organism, society is a system of interrelated parts that operate interdependently. Social media users understand that concept intuitively, and segment their relationships accordingly.

For instance, you are not the same person at work as you are among friends on a Friday night. The things you talk about, the vocabulary you use and the friendships you maintain in different contexts are the products of years of learning how to interpret relationships cues. From flirting to non-verbal communication, the way we present ourselves to others is constantly shifting based on whom we are talking to, and why.

The current social media environment has evolved to reflect this reality. It is made up of a number of independent social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.) that allow users to create and maintain separate and distinct parts of their identity with different social circles. For example, your friends are on Facebook, but you find business colleagues on LinkedIn.

This disconnect creates complications for anyone attempting to use social data to connect with customers or prospects. Where do you find the most appropriate audience? Do marketers need to maintain an ever-increasing number of individual social channels? How can we create a system that is scalable?

How Google+ Makes Social Networking More Confusing

The Google+ approach aims to simplify managing relationships, but ultimately fails because it works against people’s natural behavioral patterns. This is why Google+ faces an uphill challenge to adoption. Google+ allows users to define their own “circles” of contacts, like “High School Classmates,” “Family” or “Classic Car Fans.” The platform seeks to merge distinct interaction groups together into a unified experience. Users spend time creating the circles they want to share with, a tactic that helps push information into your contacts’ streams.

But the system breaks down once you try to consume content from a variety of different sources in your own stream. Suddenly, college roommates are mixed in with professional contacts, or people you’ve never actually met. This requires additional cognitive effort of the user to filter content by relationship, rendering the experience frustrating and confusing.

Social Networks Come With Baggage

Initial response to circles was positive, but was driven more by the temporal desire to refresh and bucket one’s relationships. Since Facebook’s popularity surge in 2008, people haven’t really been asked to categorize their friends in a social network. And naturally, in the course of three years, a user’s interpersonal relationships have likely evolved. Maybe you moved, and no longer see your old neighbor anymore, or your relationship has changed.

People grow, reinvent themselves, move to new cities and find new interests. Hanging on to your baggage from five years ago is actually a huge hindrance, and the psychic energy to maintain those old selves is more than we can cognitively manage. Therefore, we gravitate toward manageable and flexible social networks that change along with us.

Multiple, Smaller Social Networks Are Inevitable

In fact, since people are already comfortable managing multiple versions of their personas, it’s more likely that we will create increasingly narrow identities across multiple services, rather than defining ourselves on one platform. Fred Wilson writes about the nine identities he maintains on a regular basis, with full knowledge that this is just a smattering of the total personas he has created online. There’s much value in having distinct identities for different purposes — entire businesses like About.me are built on maintaining them.

Marketers must learn to identify and adapt to these different identities. They inform the potential social media interactions between a customer and a brand. For instance, messaging and status updates for one product should be tackled very differently, depending on the social channel. For example, the Droid Users group on LinkedIn may be interested in a device’s productivity benefits, while the Droid Facebook Fans may be more inclined toward gaming apps.

Additional narrowly cast identities, in fact, become the key to understanding the psychographics of users. An individual who explores a sailing forum, and is also an expert in the TiVo community, seeks a unique perspective that no large umbrella social network can fully provide. For social marketing to succeed, it needs to study the myriad of contexts and networks in which people identify themselves.

How To Create Marketing Value in a Multi-Node Social Landscape

Unfortunately, the large social networks are too busy competing with each other to tackle the challenge of various user identities, of an evolving view of consumers aggregated across multiple identity platforms. Instead, social networks run toward their defined identities: Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business, etc. They do not represent interests or values in any significant way.

The challenge for marketers, then, is to create this structure themselves. Businesses must dissect the various selves that people choose to represent them in any given interaction (or transaction). By tying together multiple identities, marketers now have the power to create a more nuanced, unified understanding of their customers than ever before.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Saks Names Denise Incandela Chief Marketing Officer

Saks Inc. has promoted Denise Incandela to chief marketing officer of Saks Fifth Avenue, a new position at the firm.

Incandela will continue to serve as president of Saks Direct, which saw comps gain 50 percent in the last quarter. The company projects it will need more distribution fulfillment capacity by mid- to late-2012 and is considering e-commerce for the retailer’s off5th.com site, which is currently an informational site, Incandela said previously. Recently, the luxury retailer launched a regular flash sale site at saksfashionfix.com, after testing the flash sale format for months on a sporadic basis. In 2009, saks.com began shipping to multiple countries.

“Denise is a proven leader, a strategic thinker, and a great executor who has led the development and extraordinary growth of Saks Direct,” said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive officer of Saks Inc. “Denise’s experience in maximizing and capitalizing on customer insights, data analytics and digital marketing will be of tremendous value in driving more integrated marketing initiatives across our lines of business.”

Incandela joined Saks Fifth Avenue in 1999 and held the titles of senior vice president of business development; group senior vice president of Saks Fifth Avenue, and executive vice president. Prior to joining Saks, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Co., working in the retail practice and with Saks Fifth Avenue, which was a client.

Incandela will continue to report to Sadove. Kimberly Grabel, senior vice president of marketing, will report to Incandela. Terron Schaefer continues as executive vice president and chief creative officer, reporting to Sadove.

Welcome

Welcome to the official blog for The Marketing Society of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. If you have any questions regarding the blog, or The Marketing Society in general, you can contact us at mktsoc@stern.nyu.edu.